Africa - The Road to Afro-Modernity

Maxwell O. Thompson-Eleogu

• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781662436864
• eBook ISBN: 9781662436871
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Metaphysics

This book is a product of a select and innovative "think tank, " NobbleAfriq Institute. It stands as the pillar and the revival of the African system of thought and spiritualism which, in turn, pave the road to Afro-modernity. For those seeking the answers to the root of the malady of our time in Africa, this book serves as a guide and inspiration. This book projects that the problem of Africa is Africa due to loss of intuitive thinking, freedom, and identity, which brought about the natural spiritual and psychological void known as "disintegrated individuality." Failure of political leadership, lack of good governance, and stunted progress in Africa are not the main problems but symptoms of disintegrated individualism, which is a loss of sense of being. We are evolving beings; therefore, we can no longer search for our identity out of the old world of the past. Our old tribal and ancestral world are not lost but outgrown. As such, our identity and the meaning of who we are cannot be found; rather, they are to be created and achieved.

Chapter One

The Old World of Ancestral Imagination

The American social vision, as expressed in the lofty words of the Declaration of Independence, states that it is a “self-evident” fact that all humans are inherently equal; this is the foundation of American exceptionalism. Human beings are not just flesh and blood; rather, we are evolving consciousness. We and the world around us evolve. This evolution is nowhere more mark than in our own consciousness. The third arm of the Declaration of Independence is the right to the pursuit of happiness, suggesting that meaningful and creative life is the foundation of a culture worthy of humans. Based on this premise, Professor John Wild of North Western University wrote that every way of life is based upon a way of looking at life. The way you look at life is your philosophy. Just as there are many ways of life, so are many ways of looking at life. The way you look at life is your philosophy. Life understood within the African settings means manners, customs, ethics, cosmology, administration of justice, marriage, entertainment, commerce, agriculture, war, and religion. For Africans, life did not end on such a level but extended to the depth of our understanding of the most basic mysteries about nature. As such, the most basic assumption of nature is that nature concealed spirit and human is the microcosm of nature. Whether this assumption is right or wrong, it means that humans have equal capacities as nature. The crucial point to note here is that John Wild talked about the way we look at life, which means our method or approach toward understanding life. Humans as evolving consciousness, what really changes is the way we look at life or nature; however, the disturbing issue here is when a group of people thought of their way of looking at life is more central and universal than others. I will demonstrate here the analogy of a mountain as an evolution of consciousness. We all began climbing at different points from the base of the mountain. It is wrong to claim that your position and your outlook at the base is the only single path to the top. Regardless of the position you are climbing from, our goal is to reach the peak of the mountain. The peak of the mountain represents the wholeness of evolution of our consciousness. Unfortunately, evolution of Africa’s consciousness falls shot because of slavery and colonialism. From that point on, Africans relinquished their attempt to reach the peak of the mountain.

This distressful way of accessing other cultures reminded me of the arrival of the missionaries in Mbanta, a fictional village in Chinua Achebe’s fiction Things Fall Apart. Achebe wrote that the arrival of the missionaries had caused a considerable stir in the village of Mbanta. There were six of them, and one of them is a White man. He said that every man and woman came out to see the White man. The White man spoke through an interpreter who was an Ibo man, though his dialect was different and harsh to the ears of Mbanta. The interpreter said that he was one of them as they could see from his color and his language. The other four Black men were also their brothers, although one of them did not speak Ibo. He said that the White man was also their brother because they were all sons of God, and he told them about this new God, the creator of all the world and all the men and women. He told them they worship false gods, gods of wood and stone. A deep murmur went through the crowd when he said this. He told them that the true God lived on high and that all men and women when they died went before Him for judgment. Evil men and women and all the heathen who in their blindness bowed to wood and stone were thrown into a fire that burned like palm oil, but good men and women who worshipped the true God lived forever in His happy kingdom. We have been sent by this great God to ask you to leave your wicked ways and false gods and turn to Him so that you may be saved when you die.

This unusual encounter between the missionaries and the villagers marked the beginning of the misunderstanding of what it might mean to live a good human life. In order to accept this new way of life, the Africans suffered setbacks against their will to accommodate the new missionary teachings. Africans were forced into this new world; they were forced to give up their culture and inhabit the world they did not understand and unable to define themselves. This new world was a product of European modernity and its claim of superior ways of life. The European modernity was the consequence of a symptom of a disrupted historical period that plagued the world and the continent of Africa. Africans were forcefully dragged into a fractured road to European modernity. They were forced into European modernity through military attacks, slavery, and colonialism, but some colonialists and slave masters considered colonialism and slavery as a way of elevating Africans to civilization. Elevating Africans to civilization means to dehumanize them, colonize, and loot African natural resources for the development of Europe and America.

Life is not just made of a single substance known as matter, based on what you can see, touch, and measure by mathematical formulas. For John Dewey, mutually transforming interaction or transaction is a primary fact of our world. Things exist only in and through interactions with other things. He said that every existence is an event with only relative stability; that is, every entity exists as a temporary history or process of change—an event that emerges from and sustained by its interaction with other processes of change or events. A mountain, for example, exists by virtue of the interaction of processes such as shifting tectonic plates, volcanic flows, glacial advances and retreats, and the eroding effects of weather and vegetation. Dewey’s points represent the naturalistic account of nature. Life can be equally perceived by non-Europeans’ view of the world as an inner process, multi-dimensional, and constantly in flux, interacts and transforms as invisible living forces of nature. The tale of the early European missionary settlers in Africa provided a good rationale to understand the challenges of a single and monopolized way of life. Philosopher Peter Koestenbaum wrote that only when we accept the “dynamic tension” of life can we mold this protean world into, meaning, we can grasp. He stated:

“Each idea and each conviction give rise to the truth of its opposite idea, belief, and conviction.” This is because reality is polarized, is paradoxical and contradictory. All life oscillates, vibrates, and is symmetrical, with a right and a left side. All life is confrontation and the stress of the opposite. If you want conflict resolved, you are asking for the unnatural. The conflict of polarity is the weight that moves the ocean’s waves and the ocean tides. Polarity is the cycles of the planets and of the seasons; it is the alternation between night and day, deep and waking, tension and relaxation. You deal with polarity not by choosing between opposites, but by riding and rocking with the swing of the cosmic dialectic. Reality and life within it is a dance, a conversation, a series of echoes; that is the meaning of being alive instead of dead.

David Bohm, a theoretical physicist, wrote that a single worldview resulted in a fragmentation of knowledge whereby the inner principles of nature are neglected. The missionaries’ actions to obliterate the African religion from the class of world religion and considered African religion as repugnant, obsolete, and dead practices. We deserve clarity about the ambiguous character of the missionaries. Why are the missionaries particular about the African lifestyle? The answer to this question is not farfetched. The missionaries had two primary agendas, firstly, the missionaries intend to save the souls of the heathens, and on the other hand, the missionaries served as advisers to the colonial government. The missionaries paved the way for the government to penetrate the hinterland and colonize the Africans and force them to accept the European lifestyle and loot the treasures of Africans. This was one reason behind their arguments to dethrone the African gods as nonexistent, reduce the African humanity as savages, and advocate for the supremacy of their God and religion as universal.

According to Achebe, the missionaries spent their first four or five nights in the marketplace and went into the village in the morning to preach the gospel. The climax of their perseverance to establish a solid relationship with the villagers was a request for a plot of land to build their church. Achebe wrote that every clan and village had its evil forest. In it was buried all those who died of the really evil diseases like leprosy and smallpox. It was also the dumping ground for the potent fetishes of great medicine men when they died. An evil forest was, therefore, alive with sinister forces and powers of darkness. It was such a forest that the rulers of Mbanta gave to the missionaries. They did not really want them in their village, and so they made them that offer which nobody in his right senses will accept. However, as a plan for the missionaries to subdue Africans under their control, they applied manipulative tactics to annoy the villagers and disorganize their leadership. The missionaries searched for the disgruntled; the alienated of the village to be converted to Christianity. Such as women whose twins were thrown away at childbirths. The church now began to admit the outcast (Osu). The outcasts were so happy in their heart to find such group of people to accept the twins and the outcast for the first time.

The missionary’...

Table of contents

• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three